How to Conduct a Social Media Competitive Analysis (Includes a Free Template)

Why perform a social media competitive analysis? So you can better understand the organizations you’re going toe-to-toe with.

“Keep your friends close but your enemies closer.”

Well said, Michael Corleone.

Though let’s replace ‘enemies’ with ‘competitors’.

Why? Because you can learn from everyone. And should.

Some things they’re doing, you should be doing. Other things, maybe not. Hard to know unless you keep an eye out.

This guide will help you perform a practical social media competitive analysis.

I said practical, not scientific. That would require more data, more gathering, more analyzing—more time and bucks too. This is something more realistic, simpler and affordable for the entrepreneur or small business.

Before plunging into the how, let’s look at the what.

Bonus:Get a free, customizable competitive analysis template to easily size up the competition and identify opportunities for your brand to pull ahead.

What is competitive analysis?

A competitor or competitive analysis is an evaluation of the competition’s strengths and weaknesses relative to your own.

For social media specifically, a competitive analysis will help you:

Identify who your competitors are on social media

Know which platforms they’re on

Know what they’re doing on those platforms now

Know what they did before

Know how well their social strategy is working for them

Know their threats to your business

Identify gaps in your own strategy

We good? Make sense? You’ll learn more as we dig in. Starting right now.

How to conduct a competitive analysis on social media

To do your analysis, you’ll need to learn more about your competitors.

Learn how they’re behaving on social, by gathering intelligence, then making sense of the data.

No need to go all Sherlock Holmes. But some useful investigation techniques will help you help your brand.

Use whatever tools makes sense to capture your notes and information. I’m suggesting a spreadsheet to keep track of it all in a single place.

Here we go.

Identify your competitors

This might be a no-brainer for you. Or maybe not. This is more challenging if your business isn’t localized. Or, if you offer products or services online or internationally.

Either way, here’s some ways to know who to keep close.

What keywords are they using?

Got a restaurant? Or a bike shop? Or do you teach acting classes?

Bring up Google, Bing, or Yahoo. Type in some keywords or phrases you want to rank for.

“Spicy food nearby.” “Titanium bicycles in NY.” “Classes in Seattle to learn how to act like a star.”

You’ll see who’s ranking for these terms.

Maybe geography doesn’t mean much to your organization. Fine, do a search based on your business to identify your online competitors.

For each search result that looks interesting, click the link to visit their site. See where they hang out on social media. Most websites list this in their header or footer.

Look through their social networks. Here’s one.

All worthy competitors make it easy to be found and heard. So it’s easy to find them using this approach.